Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City Monday May 5, 2003 The Guardian

Governments across Latin America have launched investigations after revelations that a US company is obtaining extensive personal data about millions of citizens in the region and selling it to the Bush administration.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) last year in return for its data, which includes Mexico's entire list of voters, including dates of birth and passport numbers, as well as Colombia's citizen identification database.

Literature that ChoicePoint produced to advertise its services to the department of justice promised, in the case of Colombia, a "national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status, passport number, and registered profession".

It is illegal under Colombian law for government agencies to disclose such information, except in response to a request for data on a named individual.

One lawyer following the investigations described Mexican officials as "incensed", and experts said the revelations threatened to destroy fragile public trust in the country's electoral institutions. In Nicaragua, police have raided two firms believed to have provided the data, and the Costa Rican government has also begun an inquiry. Other countries involved include Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina and Venezuela.

The identities of the firms supplying ChoicePoint with the data are unknown, since the company says its contracts ensure confidentiality, although it insists all the information was obtained legally.

Exactly how the US government is using the data is also unknown. But since it focuses so heavily on Latin America, it would appear to have vast potential for those tracking down illegal immigrants. It could perhaps also be used by US drugs enforcement agents in the region.

ChoicePoint, though, which is based near Atlanta, is far from unfamiliar to observers of the Florida vote of 2000 that decided the US presidency in George Bush's favour. Its subsidiary Database Technologies was hired by the state to overhaul its electoral registration lists - and ended up wrongly leading to the disenfranchising of thousands of voters, whose votes might have led to a different result.

Investigations in 2000 and 2001 by the Observer and the BBC's Newsnight programme concluded that thousands of voters had been removed from the lists on the grounds that DBT said they had committed felonies, preventing them from voting. In fact, the firm had identified as "felons" thousands of people who were guilty of misdemeanours, such as, in at least one case, sleeping on a park bench.

Then it produced a revised list of 57,700 "possible felons", which turned out to be riddled with mistakes because it only looked for rough matches between names of criminals and names of voters. James Lee, a vice-president of ChoicePoint, told Newsnight that Florida, governed by Mr Bush's brother Jeb, had made it clear that it "wanted there to be more names [on the list] than were actually verified as being a convicted felon". Mr Bush's eventual majority in Florida was 537.

Since the election, ChoicePoint has been the beneficiary of a huge increase in the freedom of government agencies to gain access to personal data. The USA patriot act, passed after September 11, allows government investigators to gain access to more information on US citizens without a search warrant, and to see data on private emails with such a warrant but without a wiretap order. The act also means banks must make their databases accessible to firms such as ChoicePoint.

In Mexico, the president of the federal electoral institute, Jose Woldenberg, revealed that his investigators had talked to the Mexican company that said it paid a "third person" 400,000 pesos (£24,500) for a hard disk full of personal data drawn largely from the electoral roll. It sold this to ChoicePoint for just $250,000, indicating the huge profitability of ChoicePoint's contracts - last year's $11m payment was part of a five-year contract worth $67m.

"The companies had to know that it is forbidden to use the information in the electoral register for any other purpose than elections," said Julio Tellez, a specialist in Mexico's information laws at the Tec de Monterrey University. "It is a federal crime to misuse the information, and they did that by selling it and putting it in the hands of a foreign government."

Mr Tellez said he believed that this makes the companies and the US government liable to prosecution.

The sale of information from the electoral register is particularly devastating in Mexico, because the electoral institute enjoyed a close to unique reputation for honesty and transparency in a country plagued by corruption.

"We feel betrayed. The IFE [federal electoral institute] was the only Mexican organisation we could trust," said Cesar Diaz, a Mexico City supermarket administrator whose feelings were echoed by many. "I mean, if we can't trust them who can we believe in? I think it will have repercussions in the next elections."

Britain's much stronger data-protection framework probably means ChoicePoint could not make similar wholesale purchases of databases from the UK, and a similar situation exists across the rest of the EU. But the Latin American states "don't have data protection on the level of Europe", said Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a Washington-based pressure group which obtained the purchasing and advertising documents.

ChoicePoint was taking advantage of those more relaxed laws to profit from the US's "increasing reliance on private companies to obtain data on persons of interest to law enforcement", he said.

But the US government has shown itself eager to enhance the amount of data it can gather on people across the world, including those in the UK. In February, Washington announced that it would be seeking access to credit card details and other information on all travellers entering the US. Britain, too, is proposing laws which would give state agencies wide-ranging access to information regarding telephone and email use, though ministers insist their plans will not now include the content of such communications.

In a statement provided to the Guardian, ChoicePoint strongly denied breaking any laws and said it was cooperating fully with Mexican authorities. "All information collected by ChoicePoint on foreign citizens is obtained legally from public agencies or private vendors," the statement said.

The statement insisted that "ChoicePoint did not purchase election registry information and our vendor has verified that the information we purchased was not from the padron electoral [Mexico's central registry of electors]". But that claim is called into question by the company's advertising documents. Those documents, dated September 2001, explicitly boast that ChoicePoint can offer a "nationwide listing of all Mexican citizens registered to vote as of the 2000 general election - updated annually".

Asked how the US government is using the data, Greg Palmore, a spokesman for the bureau of immigration and customs, said it was helping to trace illegal immigrants but only if they were guilty of another crime. Asked to confirm whether the data was used by his bureau only to pursue criminals, he said: "Mainly."

ChoicePoint insists that it requires all its subcontractors to sign pledges that they are not breaking the law. But legal experts say that would offer it scant protection if the Latin American police inquiries were to result in others being convicted.

"If you know that a practice is actually illegal, you can't immunise yourself" with a pledge, said Mr Hoofnagle. "There's a strong principle in US law of being responsible for the actions of your agents."

<a href=www.tuscaloosanews.com>The Associated Press May 04, 2003

President Hugo Chavez blamed his political foes Sunday for provoking a shooting spree that resulted in a man's death during an opposition march last week.

Chavez said the May Day violence was the latest attempt by his opponents to destabilize Venezuela and undermine his presidency.

"It's the same format, the same script, the same characters," Chavez said, drawing similarities with a failed military coup against him last year and a series of high-profile killings in recent months. On each occasion the opposition has blamed civilian deaths on violent supporters of the government and said a climate of impunity has prevented those responsible from being convicted.

Ricardo Herrera, a 46-year-old construction worker, was shot and killed at Thursday's rally by an unknown gunman who escaped on a motorcycle. Police have made several arrests in connection with the shooting.

Cofavic, a Venezuelan human rights group, said Saturday that political violence is on the rise and attributed the problem in party to a lax justice system. Cofavic said 57 people have been killed and over 300 injured by gunfire in politically motivated violence since the failed coup in April 2002.

Almost all the killings remain unsolved and no connection linking either the government or the opposition to any of the deaths has been established.

By Nesa Subrahmaniyan

Singapore, May 5 (<a href=quote.bloomberg.com>Bloomberg) -- Asian gasoil and jet-fuel markets face a glut after a shorter-than-expected war in Iraq left Saudi Aramco, the world's biggest oil company, and rival Kuwait Petroleum Corp. with unwanted supplies stored for military use.

Cargoes of diesel and jet kerosene are likely to head to Asia in the next two months as Middle East refiners look for buyers, according to a Bloomberg News survey of five oil refiners and traders. Kuwait Petroleum, which halted shipments of the fuels to Asia before the U.S.-led invasion, may resume exports this month.

``Oil products were stored for strategic purposes and now obviously, there's no need for that,'' said Abdallah Kharma, deputy head of international trading at China Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corp. Normal exports from the countries would be supplemented by fuel from reserves, he said.

An increase in supply of jet fuel would come after Asian airlines cut flights because of a viral outbreak that reduced travel demand. Severe acute respiratory syndrome has killed more than 400 people and infected more than 6,200, mostly in China and Hong Kong.

Asia's consumption of jet fuel, a type of kerosene, may decline between 5 percent and 10 percent between April and June compared with a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg survey last month of five oil trading companies, airlines and refiners.

SARS

The demand drop seems to be exacerbated because of SARS,'' said Katsunori Watanabe, director of research at Nihon Unicom Corp., a futures trading company in Tokyo. Jet fuel consumption is down in Asia by almost 20 percent.''

Asian carriers such as Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. and Singapore Airlines Ltd. slashed a total of more than 650 weekly flights last month.

Fuel prices may also be hit by the decline in crude oil costs. Middle East oil producers pumped more crude in the first quarter to offset supply disruptions from Venezuela, crippled by a strike, and from Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion.

As Venezuelan and Iraqi supplies return to the market, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is trying to rein back those additional barrels to avoid a glut. The group said it will reduce output by 2 million barrels a day starting June 1 in an effort to stem a drop in prices.

Brent crude oil prices on London's International petroleum Exchange, which mirror Persian Gulf crude price movements, have fallen more than 27 percent since their March 12 peak.

Fuels

Jet-fuel and gasoil prices in Asia have fallen even faster. Prices of jet fuel declined by 34 percent in Singapore, Asia's biggest oil trading center, to $28.75 a barrel on Friday from this year's high of $43.35 on Feb. 10, according to Bloomberg data.

Diesel, or gasoil, used to fuel tanks and trucks, has fallen 30 percent to $29.05 a barrel from this year's high of $41.70 a barrel on March 10.

Kuwait, which has bases for U.S. and U.K. troops, may restart exports in May that were suspended earlier in case the supplies were needed by the military, Nader Sultan, chief executive of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp., said in an April 15 interview. Kuwait produces about 120,000 barrels of jet fuel a day.

Naphtha supplies from the Middle East have also risen because the raw material for gasoline and chemicals was produced at the same time as the gasoil. State-owned Kuwait Petroleum, which normally sells naphtha to customers under annual contracts, sold 100,000 tons in the spot market for loading in April, a company official said earlier.

Saudi Aramco officials declined to comment on reports that it offered two cargoes in the spot market in April. Naphtha prices delivered to Japan have declined 44 percent to $218.13 a ton from this year's high of $388.50 a ton on March 10, according to Bloomberg data.

Demand

I don't think there will be a problem with supply, the problem is going to be demand,'' said Kharma of China Aviation. The picture is not going to be great, probably end-May, end-June because I think we have quite a bit of products coming out.''

In the first quarter, shipments from the Middle East slowed because a war premium boosted freight rates in the region as the U.S. geared up to attack Iraq.

The freight rate between the Arabian Gulf and Japan, measured in World Scale points, an industry benchmark, has fallen 6.8 percent to 275 on Friday after rising to a one-year high of 295 on April 14.

``The shipping rates will come down now and the war risk premium will come down,'' lowering the rate at which fuels can be profitably shipped to Asia, China Aviation's Kharma said. Last Updated: May 4, 2003 12:01 EDT

Dollars & Sense BY ARTHUR MACEWAN   Before U.S. forces invaded Iraq, the United Nations inspection team that had been searching the country for weapons of mass destruction was unable to find either such weapons or a capacity to produce them in the near future. As of mid-April, while the U.S. military is apparently wrapping up its invasion, it too has not found the alleged weapons. The U.S. government continues to claim that weapons of mass destruction exist in Iraq but provides scant evidence to substantiate its claim.

While weapons of mass destruction are hard to find in Iraq, there is one thing that is relatively easy to find: oil. Lots of oil. With 112.5 billion barrels of proven reserves, Iraq has greater stores of oil than any country except Saudi Arabia. This combination—lots of oil and no weapons of mass destruction—begs the question: Is it oil and not weapons of mass destruction that motivates the U.S. government’s aggressive policy towards Iraq?

The U.S. "Need" for Oil?

Much of the discussion of the United States, oil, and Iraq focuses on the U.S. economy’s overall dependence on oil. We are a country highly dependent on oil, consuming far more than we produce. We have a small share, about 3%, of the world’s total proven oil reserves. By depleting our reserves at a much higher rate than most other countries, the United States accounts for about 10% of world production. But, by importing from the rest of the world, we can consume oil at a still higher rate: U.S. oil consumption is over 25% of the world’s total. (See the accompanying figures for these and related data.) Thus, the United States relies on the rest of the world’s oil in order to keep its economy running—or at least running in its present oil-dependent form. Moreover, for the United States to operate as it does and maintain current standards of living, we need access to oil at low prices. Otherwise we would have to turn over a large share of U.S. GDP as payment to those who supply us with oil.

Iraq could present the United States with supply problems. With a hostile government in Baghdad, the likelihood that the United States would be subject to some sort of boycott as in the early 1970s is greater than otherwise. Likewise, a government in Baghdad that does not cooperate with Washington could be a catalyst to a reinvigoration of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the result could be higher oil prices.

Such threats, however, while real, are not as great as they might first appear. Boycotts are hard to maintain. The sellers of oil need to sell as much as the buyers need to buy; oil exporters depend on the U.S. market, just as U.S. consumers depend on those exporters. (An illustration of this mutual dependence is provided by the continuing oil trade between Iraq and the United States in recent years. During 2001, while the two countries were in a virtual state of war, the United States bought 284 million barrels of oil from Iraq, about 7% of U.S. imports and almost a third of Iraq’s exports.) Also, U.S. oil imports come from diverse sources, with less than half from OPEC countries and less than one-quarter from Persian Gulf nations.

Most important, ever since the initial surge of OPEC in the 1970s, the organization has followed a policy of price restraint. While price restraint may in part be a strategy of political cooperation, resulting from the close U.S.-Saudi relationship in particular, it is also a policy adopted because high prices are counter-productive for OPEC itself; high prices lead consumers to switch sources of supply and conserve energy, undercutting the longer term profits for the oil suppliers. Furthermore, a sudden rise in prices can lead to general economic disruption, which is no more desirable for the oil exporters than for the oil importers. To be sure, the United States would prefer to have cooperative governments in oil producing countries, but the specter of another boycott as in the 1970s or somewhat higher prices for oil hardly provides a rationale, let alone a justification, for war.

The Profits Problem

There is, however, also the importance of oil in the profits of large U.S. firms: the oil companies themselves (with ExxonMobil at the head of the list) but also the numerous drilling, shipping, refining, and marketing firms that make up the rest of the oil industry. Perhaps the most famous of this latter group, because former CEO Dick Cheney is now vice president, is the Halliburton Company, which supplies a wide range of equipment and engineering services to the industry. Even while many governments—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela, for example—have taken ownership of their countries’ oil reserves, these companies have been able to maintain their profits because of their decisive roles at each stage in the long sequence from exploration through drilling to refining and marketing. Ultimately, however, as with any resource-based industry, the monopolistic position—and thus the large profits—of the firms that dominate the oil industry depends on their access to the supply of the resource. Their access, in turn, depends on the relations they are able to establish with the governments of oil-producing countries.

From the perspective of the major U.S. oil companies, a hostile Iraqi government presents a clear set of problems. To begin with, there is the obvious: because Iraq has a lot of oil, access to that oil would represent an important profit-making opportunity. What’s more, Iraqi oil can be easily extracted and thus produced at very low cost. With all oil selling at the same price on the world market, Iraqi oil thus presents opportunities for especially large profits per unit of production. According to the Guardian newspaper (London), Iraqi oil could cost as little as 97 cents a barrel to produce, compared to the UK’s North Sea oil produced at $3 to $4 per barrel. As one oil executive told the Guardian last November, "Ninety cents a barrel for oil that sells for $30—that’s the kind of business anyone would want to be in. A 97% profit margin—you can live with that." The Guardian continues: "The stakes are high. Iraq could be producing 8 million barrels a day within the decade. The math is impressive—8 million times 365 at $30 per barrel or $87.5 billion a year. Any share would be worth fighting for." The question for the oil companies is: what share will they be able to claim and what share will be claimed by the Iraqi government? The split would undoubtedly be more favorable for the oil companies with a compliant U.S.-installed government in Baghdad.

Furthermore, the conflict is not simply one between the private oil companies and the government of Iraq. The U.S.-based firms and their British (and British-Dutch) allies are vying with French, Russian, and Chinese firms for access to Iraqi oil. During recent years, firms from these other nations signed oil exploration and development contracts with the Hussein government in Iraq, and, if there were no "regime change," they would preempt the operations of the U.S. and British firms in that country. If, however, the U.S. government succeeds in replacing the government of Saddam Hussein with its preferred allies in the Iraqi opposition, the outlook will change dramatically. According to Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and a figure in the Iraqi opposition who seems to be currently favored by Washington, "The future democratic government in Iraq will be grateful to the United States for helping the Iraqi people liberate themselves and getting rid of Saddam.... American companies, we expect, will play an important and leading role in the future oil situation." (In recent years, U.S. firms have not been fully frozen out of the oil business in Iraq. For example, according to a June 2001 report in the Washington Post, while Vice President Cheney was CEO at Halliburton Company during the late 1990s, the firm operated through subsidiaries to sell some $73 million of oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.)

The rivalry with French, Russian and Chinese oil companies is in part driven by the direct prize of the profits to be obtained from Iraqi operations. In addition, in order to maintain their dominant positions in the world oil industry, it is important for the U.S. and British-based firms to deprive their rivals of the growth potential that access to Iraq would afford. In any monopolistic industry, leading firms need to deny their potential competitors market position and control of new sources of supply; otherwise, those competitors will be in a better position to challenge the leaders. The British Guardian reports that the Hussein government is "believed to have offered the French company TotalFinaElf exclusive rights to the largest of Iraq’s oil fields, the Majoon, which would more than double the company’s entire output at a single stroke." Such a development would catapult TotalFinaElf from the second ranks into the first ranks of the major oil firms. The basic structure of the world oil industry would not change, but the sharing of power and profits among the leaders would be altered. Thus for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and the other traditional "majors" in the industry, access to Iraq is a defensive as well as an offensive goal. ("Regime change" in Iraq will not necessarily provide the legal basis for cancellation of contracts signed between the Hussein regime and various oil companies. International law would not allow a new regime simply to turn things over to the U.S. oil companies. "Should ‘regime change’ happen, one thing is guaranteed," according to the Guardian, "shortly afterwards there will be the mother of all legal úbattles.")

Oil companies are big and powerful. The biggest, ExxonMobil, had 2002 profits of $15 billion, more than any other corporation, in the United States or in the world. Chevron-Texacocame in with $3.3 billion in 2002 profits, and Phillips-Tosco garnered $1.7 billion. British Petroleum-Amoco-Arco pulled in $8 billion, while Royal Dutch/Shell Group registered almost $11 billion. Firms of this magnitude have a large role affecting the policies of their governments, and, for that matter, the governments of many other countries.

With the ascendancy of the Bush-Cheney team to the White House in 2000, perhaps the relationship between oil and the government became more personal, but it was not new. Big oil has been important in shaping U.S. foreign policy since the end of the 19th century (to say nothing of its role in shaping other policy realms, particularly environmental regulation). From 1914, when the Marines landed at Mexico’s Tampico Bay to protect U.S. oil interests, to the CIA-engineered overthrow of the Mosadegh government in Iran in 1953, to the close relationship with the oppressive Saudi monarchy through the past 70 years, oil and the interests of the oil companies have been central factors in U.S. foreign policy. Iraq today is one more chapter in a long story.

The Larger Issue

Yet in Iraq today, as in many other instances of the U.S. government’s international actions, oil is not the whole story. The international policies of the U.S. government are certainly shaped in significant part by the interests of U.S.-based firms, but not only the oil companies. ExxonMobil may have had the largest 2002 profits, but there are many additional large U.S. firms with international interests: Citbank and the other huge financial firms; IBM, Microsoft, and other information technology companies; General Motors and Ford; Merck, Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical corporations; large retailers like MacDonald’s and Wal-Mart (and many more) depend on access to foreign markets and foreign sources of supply for large shares of their sales and profits.

The U.S. government (like other governments) has long defined its role in international affairs as protecting the interests of its nationals, and by far the largest interests of U.S. nationals abroad are the interests of these large U.S. companies. The day-to-day activities of U.S. embassies and consular offices around the world are dominated by efforts to further the interests of particular U.S. firms—for example, helping the firms establish local markets, negotiate a country’s regulations, or develop relations with local businesses. When the issue is large, such as when governments in low-income countries have attempted to assure the availability of HIV-AIDS drugs in spite of patents held by U.S. firms, Washington steps directly into the fray. On the broadest level, the U.S. government tries to shape the rules and institutions of the world economy in ways that work well for U.S. firms. These rules are summed up under the heading of "free trade," which in practice means free access of U.S. firms to the markets and resources of the rest of the world.

In normal times, Washington uses diplomacy and institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to shape the rules of the world economy. But times are not always "normal." When governments have attempted to removetheir economies from the open system and break with the "rules of the game," the U.S. government has responded with overt or covert military interventions. Latin America has had a long history of such interventions, where Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Chile (1973) and Nicaragua (1980s) provide fairly recent examples. The Middle East also provides several illustrations of this approach to foreign affairs, with U.S. interventions in Iran (1953), Lebanon (1958), Libya (1981), and now Iraq. These interventions are generally presented as efforts to preserve freedom and democracy, but, if freedom and democracy were actually the goals of U.S. interventions the record would be very different; both the Saudi monarchy and the Shah of Iran, in an earlier era, would then have been high on the U.S. hit list. (Also, as with maintaining the source of supply of oil, the U.S. government did not intervene in Guatemala in 1954 to maintain our supply of bananas; the profits of the United Fruit Company, however, did provide a powerful causal factor.)

The rhetorical rationale of U.S. foreign policy has seen many alterations and adjustments over the last century: at the end of the 19th century, U.S. officials spoke of the need to spread Christianity; Woodrow Wilson defined the mission as keeping the world safe for democracy; for most of the latter half of the 20th century, the fight against Communism was the paramount rationale; for a fleeting moment during the Carter administration, the protection of human rights entered the government’s vocabulary; in recent years we have seen the war against drugs; and now we have the current administration’s war against terrorism.

What distinguishes the current administration in Washington is neither its approach toward foreign affairs and U.S. business interests in general nor its policy in the Middle East and oil interests in particular. Even its rhetoric builds on well established traditions, albeit with new twists. What does distinguish the Bush administration is the clarity and aggressiveness with which it has put forth its goal of maintaining U.S. domination internationally. The "Bush Doctrine" that the administration has articulated claims legitimacy for pre-emptive action against those who might threaten U.S. interests, and it is clear from the statement of that doctrine in last September’s issuance of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America that "U.S. interests" includes economic interests.

The economic story is never the whole story, and oil is never the whole economic story. In the particular application of U.S. power, numerous strategic and political considerations come into play. With the application of the Bush Doctrine in the case of Iraq, the especially heinous character of the Hussein regime is certainly a factor, as is the regime’s history of conflict with other nations of the region (at times with U.S. support) and its apparent efforts at developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; certainly the weakness of the Iraqi military also affects the U.S. government’s willingness to go to war. Yet, asSeptember’s Security Strategy document makes clear, the U.S. government is concerned with domination and a major factor driving that goal of domination is economic. In the Middle East, Iraq and elsewhere, oil—or, more precisely, the profit from oil—looms large in the picture.

An earlier version of this article was prepared for the newsletter of the Joiner Center for War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This article was largely prepared before the start of the war on Iraq.

Arthur MacEwan teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. His most recent book is Neoliberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century (Zed Books, 1999). A founder of Dollars & Sense, he served as its "Ask Dr. Dollar" columnist from 1997 to 2001 and is a D&S associate.

Issue #247, May/June 2003

Dollars & Sense magazine, 740 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02141, USA, provides left perspectives on economic affairs. It is published six times a year and is edited by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists committed to social justice and economic democracy.

Sunday, May 4, 2003 Posted: 7:56 PM EDT (2356 GMT)

FACT BOX Gasoline prices in selected U.S. cities. Prices are per gallon of regular: Atlanta, Georgia: $1.33 Charleston, South Carolina: $1.34 Houston, Texas: $1.42 Salt Lake City, Utah: $1.56 Boston, Massachusetts: $1.61 Chicago, Illinois: $1.62

CAMARILLO, California (CNN) -- The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline has plummeted for the sixth week in a row, falling during that time more than 18 cents, according to a nationwide survey released Sunday.

In the two-week period that ended May 2, the nationwide price fell 6.34 cents, to $1.55, said Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey.

The reasons for the price declines haven't changed since March 21, when the average gas price was $1.73 per gallon, she said.

Crude oil prices began falling after the U.S.-led war on Iraq was launched and fears receded that Iraq would set its wells afire, Lundberg said.

"That fear was removed," she said.

The situation in Venezuela, another potential source of uncertainty, has also stabilized, Lundberg noted.

A general strike in December cut petroleum output from the world's fifth-largest oil exporter to a trickle, but Venezuelan officials say they have boosted production back to pre-strike levels, Lundberg said.

Despite the recent drops in price, the average price for self-service regular gasoline is still nearly 13 cents higher than it was this time last year.

The lowest average survey price was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at $1.29; the highest was in San Francisco, California, at $1.99.